By Heimlich A. Laguz

Top Dog & Woki

Ok, so possession is a strange thing. When I think about the image of a berserker triggering a violent trance by biting at a shield, I guess I figure something more primal than the berzerker’s everyday personality is at
play.

You might have heard of a chap called Justice Yeldam, an experimental musician. He attaches microphones to pieces of glass, then manipulates the glass with his mouth. The sounds this creates are pretty wild, and his performances seem to involve a lot of blood.

The funny thing is, he says that despite how gory it all looks, he never really hurts himself very much. He goes into a very altered state and somehow in that state no harm comes to him.

In fact I recently I read an interview with him in which he laughs about the irony of a time when he badly cut his foot in a safe environment after a doing a performance that involved putting broken glass in his mouth for half an hour to no negative effect.

Think that sounds like berzerkergang? You bet, except this chap isn’t killing someone, he’s just putting himself at risk in order to create some very strange art. Which suggests that 1) violence is only one use for a berserk state and 2) berzerkergang has an awful lot in common with seidh.

The physiological science of all this stuff isn’t at all controversial – it has a lot to do with activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates all the bodily functions you can’t consciously control.

In other words, back we go to my good friend and writing partner the unconscious. The Uppsala Berzerkergang article goes into all this stuff in a lot more detail.

This is probably part of why in historical battles it was very helpful to surprise your enemy. While your side has had plenty of time to get itself all riled up and psycho-physically primed for conflict, the other side is still in a more sustainable, everyday, vulnerable conscious state. It is anything but a fair contest.

Of course today warfare seems to be more about having lots of bombs that you can bravely drop on the foe from thousands of miles away.

My reason for recounting all of this is to underline very strongly that there are many, many different shapes in which altered states can manifest, and those shapes are highly plastic. Thus the practices surrounding Heathen battle magic and the practices surrounding modern experimental music produce some comparable psycho-physical changes.

Some folks in modern Heathen argue that we absolutely must reconstruct the archaic practices as closely as possible or else we are somehow letting the Heathen side down. Well I agree that this is a fruitful and inspiring thing to do.

But it is also pretty clear that if we have different (perhaps even more) options available to reach the desired conscious states then that is no bad thing.

It certainly lacks any historical validity for me to use black metal as a consciousness altering tool, but somehow I think my ancestors would approve (at least once their ears recovered from the onslaught).

These comments serve as a pre-amble to the introduction of two possession forms that have entered my life in the last few months – namely Top Dog and Woki.

Top Dog is – well, he is THE dog. Class all the way. People get out of his way in the street when they see him coming. He like sunglasses, expensive alcoholic drinks, walking sticks and snappy clothes. Its hard not to love Top Dog because, damn it, he just loves himself so much!

Top Dog entered my life to help me in promoting my business, since I am naturally an introverted and retiring person (unless I am screaming my guts out on a stage – see above comments about using modern contexts to produce ancient trance states).

Since I am not a typical sunny kind a guy who thinks nothing of telephoning one thousand total strangers a day in the chase for referrals and work, I prefer not to be involved. Top Dog very kindly shadows me when I have to do this sort of thing.

Since Top Dog is undoubtedly THE dog of dogs, the classiest of class, he has no problem in selling us both to potential referral sources. Top Dog used my anxiety about promoting myself as a door to take over the reins – it was that anxiety which put my bodymind into the appropriately receptive state the first time we met.

He is in fact quite subtle in his presence when I am working with him (after all they are ultimately buying my services, not his). But during times of recreation he loves to put on the whole show, dancing, howling and amusing my somewhat dumbfounded wife with his antics.

He also likes walking around the neighbourhood, just so he knows that people have seen him around. And when he wants he can effect a total submersion ofmy ego, whereas usually when gods or spirits ride me I retain some sense of separate identity, watching as it were from the back of my skull.

Don’t tell anyone, but Top Dog seems to me to be an Odinnic identity. In fact, not long before Top Dog arrived on the scene my wife and I both noticed independently in Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology an intriguing Old Norse mythological name which I think is related to Odin – namely Hundalf/Hundulf.

There are debates about how this is translated – Dog-Elf or Dog-Wolf are the most common. I like to think Dog Wolf is the correct meaning – he is so purely Top Dog that one word for canine is not enough, so in Old Norse he gets two! I hope to get more of Top Dog into my life and to put together some really Classy
outfits for him to dress up in. It’s the least I can do in return for the help he gives me!

Oddly, Top Dog also reminds me of the Vodoun deity Baron Samedi, thought the Baron is admittedly a little more macabre than Hundulf is. Clint observed to me recently that there are many odd similarities between Heathenry and Vodoun. Weirder things have happened!

As for Woki – well let’s just say that WOden-loKI is a pretty natural concatenation is it not? But in truth I have had only limited experience with Woki thus far – though I must say that he turns up extremely quickly when invoked. He too is very energetic and a bit of a trouble maker.

I’m not sure how the deities in question arrange for this sort of alchemy to work out but I hope they continue with it. I love it! I also hope they teach me to get better at better at opening into their presence because really the average Odinnic or Loko personality is much more interesting than the average conventional me.

Or to refine that point – the most interesting parts of me get greatly amplified when these beings/patterns/mental states/trances/illusions/truths/insert-your-own-metaphyiscal-term start loitering around my bodymind.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Review: Seidways (Jan Fries)

I knew about this book for years before buying it earlier in 2007. I always felt it would be a revolutionary text for me, yet somehow I never got around to buying it (admittedly in part due to Mandrake’s poor distribution in Australia).

After about 10 pages I decided that Fries is the greatest author on Germanic magic alive. He is able to consider so many perspectives, casually avoids the rigidity of authors such as Thorsson that I found so discouraging as a newbie, and is very open about where research stops and personal opinion starts. His ideas are extremely unorthodox, and the extent of “authenticity” can be questioned about this book in various ways – but Fries never pretends to be anything he is not, and this open honesty is far more preferable than the pompous pretend-authenticity of many other books about historically inspired magical practices.

When I finished the book I immediately read it again, and took about 40 pages of notes. Anyone who knows me would find such conscientious reading totally alien to my usual habits!

His descriptions of seething experiences brought up so many memories of experiences I have had during my life, experiences which I have known were magical and which I loved and longed for… but which I felt unable to explore, to grasp a hold of. Well, Fries gives plenty of encouragement and ways into the conscious induction of trance and seething and I have been regularly and spontaneously delving ever since!

This keen attention and love of the experience of spirit, not just the the forms and images of it, is what makes this book so powerful. It correctly assesses mythology to be a door into that which cannot be said, rather than an end in itself.

His summary of different cultural practices is also extremely interesting and helpful. He is clear that all cultures are not interchangeable, but he is also clear that there can be similarities across culture. So rare to find an author with the political good sense to recognise that culture is neither hermetically sealed nor dissolved into the new age sewer!

This book has also helped to awaken my latent connection to snake energy, which I have felt for years and never been able to make sense of. Given that I see Odin as a snake god (Bolverkr, anyone?), I have been given a huge new lease on life in my relationship to my patron god.

A lot of people I know have bought this book at my urgent insistence, I get very aggressive about it. YOU have to read this book. If you get 10% of what I got from it, then you’ve easily gotten your money’s worth.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Review: The Whisperings of Woden (Galina Krasskova)

This book is a must for those like myself who, while deeply attached to the integrity of the historical record, want more of heathenism than arguments over matters of fact and history.

This book, then, is a door towards the personal relationship that the author has with Woden. As I have a similar relationship, I found the book to be extremely moving and powerful. It is so rare to read books on heathenism which have any sense of personal connection or understanding. There is no abstraction here.

Furthermore, Galina is extremely clear about where the historical record ends and her own personal inspiration begins. This is an important step because in doing so she demonstrates that care for the historical record can go hand in hand with developing new expressions of heathen spirituality. The latter does not Have to come at the expense of the former.

Some of the practices offered in the book are not that directly interesting to me, largely because some of these things I have invented in my own way already. But the real gift is the inspiration, the invitation to forge new ways of exploring my relationship to One Eye.

Thank you so much for this work, Galina. I am deeply glad that I bought it.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Review: True Helm (Sweyn Plowright)

Sweyn of course has contributed several articles to the Elhaz Ablaze Guest Journal. True Helm is his first, and rather classic, book. His subject? Wariorship within the Northern Tradition from a living and practical point of view.

I’ve been reading and rereading this book ever since it came out. It presents the glassy and simple surface of Ice (“the broad bridge; the blind need to be led”).

Yet between the words lies a profound depth of wisdom and experience. As I grow, learn more about myself and life, and expand my perspective, I return to this book again and again, and each time I do I am astounded at how much more wisdom there is waiting for me in the wings.

Sweyn writes with a brutally utility-oriented style which really cuts through the pomp of some authors in these subject areas. Much of the book’s real spiritual wealth is expressed indirectly through metaphor or implication, which means that the ignorant will not even notice the author’s insight. It forces you to sharpen your mind and perception.

I do think there are other equally rich ways of understanding berzerkergang than the one outlined in this book, but I dont see them as mutually exclusive.

A book to be studied and treasured.

Buy your copy here.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Review: The Rune Primer (Sweyn Plowright)

Sweyn has done something really beautiful with this book.

Whenever I open its covers I feel stripped of all assumptions, beliefs, shoulds, arbitrary laws, dogma and faith.

I feel Sweyn has cleared a path back to what it is all about anyway – RUNA, the not knowing, the mystery, the not seeking comfort in false answers.

for me this book is brutally skeptical AND YET this thrusts me into a new freedom.

I really like the translations of the rune poems and I find myself reading them every morning before heading out to work or whatever for the day. They inspire me to reconnect with Runa in new ways.

A new creativity is invited – I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s reflection on the death of god – sailing out into infinite seas from the land – only realise there never was any land…

I think we can all be very grateful for Sweyn’s decision to release this second edition of his book. It is a masterpiece.

Buy your copy here

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Anti-Nidstang Extravaganza

A while back I was doing some magic involving runes, the Norns and the goddess Brigit.

One consequence of this was that the Norns suggested that I perform a kind of reverse nidstang in order to invite the local land spirits into more presence and comfort with the local human/built environment, and with me in particular.

The issue where I live is particularly loaded because we have seen a lot of very dubious development in the area which has been bad for the local environment (both physical and psychological). Indeed, our local council was dissolved not so long ago due to rampant corruption after allowing many, many unconscionable development projects to go ahead.

Near our home is a place called Sandon Point, a small marshland and then a long promontory out into the sea. The area has a very delicate ecosystem and is also an Aboriginal sacred site and (I think) burial ground.

After years of struggle between a large and unscrupulous corporation and the entire local community a terrible development was permitted over part of the area near the Point – and I must say the houses they have put up are truly ugly things. I mean really horrendous to the eye. If I were a local land spirit I would be very, very, very angry.

I’m told there a lot of spirits around the place and that the ghost of some kind of Aboriginal shaman person still haunts the area. In fact I think I may have once seen this being in my imaginal eye. With all that magic around the place I certainly wouldn’t want to live in one of those upmarket Legoland dwellings.

Thinking about my recent experience which what seemed to be an Aboriginal spirit, I decided now was the time to take the Norns’ advice and perform my anti-nidstang magic. And I decided that the Point was the place to do it.

I prepared my nidstang with some wood from our little garden, carving three runes (Ansuz, Nauthiz and Hagalaz) that were indicated to me by the Norns.

I rode out on my bike to the location late last night. It was an almost full moon which loaned an eerie atmosphere to the proceedings.

So once I was out on the rocks of the Point, the sea glowering on the dark horizon, I suddenly had the thought that correct etiquette would be to state my identity and purpose to the spirits here. This in fact I think a very conventional Aboriginal custom though I wasn’t thinking about it at the time.

So I talked about my ancestry, my ideals and values, my reasons for being there, and so forth. I felt beings drawn in all around me and for while it was like the air was holding its breath.

Then various voices somehow came into my awareness, testing me, asking me difficult questions, attempting to intimidate me. They were not happy and they did not like me particularly, thanks to the actions of others like me. It was a long conversation and I felt quite vulnerable because they quickly demonstrated the ability to control my movements – and threatened that they might make me drown myself.

But I am good at dealing with imaginal realities and we reached some kind of understanding. It helped that after a whole Woden checked in and took over for me. He was a lot better than I at relating to the local spirits and I think his great age and primal nature made a strange kind of sense to them.

I searched for the right place to place the nidstang and at that moment I found that the rocks, the sand and the water all seemed to swirl into the seeming of faces and figures. It was an incredible experience to find myself amid the rich chaos of the place, feeling myself to be watched and with the spirits both physically and imaginally.

Finally I found the right place to plant the nidstang, spoke the names of the runes over it, and bowed in respect to the land, the sea, the sky, the moon and the spectrum of their manifestations.

I stood, the rite completed. Suddenly from both sides of me great flocks of sea birds flew up into the air, singing and shouting, disappearing into the dark night. It was a beautiful moment. I rode home with a sense of curiosity as to what my actions might mean for the local wights, the local people, the whole of the local spirit of place.

Something the spirits at the Point asked me to do was to make contact with the local Aboriginal community and learn more about their ways of relating to the local environment. I am very hesitant to do this. I don’t particularly wish to seem like I am trying to steal from their already assaulted and marginalised culture.

I asked that some openings come my way for this to occur without me taking the first steps or having to force the issue. This way I can be comfortable that I am not overstepping the bounds. I do not know what will come of this.

I’m very pleased to have followed up and completed this bit of magic, and to have carried out the Norns’ advice, to have given something I dreamed and imagined the flesh of physical action. It was a beautiful, if somewhat frightening, experience, and one I am very glad to have had.

Perhaps now I need to call on Brigit and have her take me to the Norns again so that I can report back and get their advice on how to proceed.

It also occurs to me that this magic was a little like the Seat-and-mound seidh I wrote about a post or two ago. As usual I do things in an idiosyncratic way. I’m not comfortable with the idea of calling up someone else’s ancestors per se. But I live here in this environment and I think communing with it is rather necessary.

So perhaps more inspiration will come to me in this vein with time and my practical grasp of seidh might just get to widen a bit further. I wouldn’t mind coming to understand more about the nidstang thing either, and more about its reversal.

Incidentally, thank you Rod Landreth for your very thorough response on the seidh subject, yes I’d love to know more about your work if you want to email me, you hopefully have my email address from the Seidhr Study list posts I’ve made.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Dealing with a Spirit; Heathens in Australia

Annalise and I had some very strange experiences this last week with what seemed to be a ghost or spirit. Strange enough to be worth documenting.

I should say before I go any further that as always I am hesitant to attach some kind of fixed meaning to terms like “ghost”. I really don’t know what the true nature of this entity was and I can only relate to it phenomenologically, that is, as something I found myself in some kind of engagement or relationship with.

I have to take it as what it presents itself as and put aside metaphysical questions. Otherwise I fear losing the thing itself in exchange for theories which are likely to represent only an approximation of the thing itself.

For the more sceptical reader, therefore, I am not implying or relying upon any particular metaphysical theory when I talk about ghosts or any other of the many odd subjects that I write about in this journal.

Now that this preamble is done…

The story begins with Annalise reporting to me that she feels like some ghost or being is around her, drawing on her strength. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. At the time I didn’t really know what to do, but she got rather sick.

As an aside we spent a few hours doing some big rune chanting and that dropped her sickness from a subjective rating of 9/10 sick vs. well to about 0.3/10 sick vs. well. Not a bad effort.

I find putting numbers on things is useful for tracking feedback in these kinds of circumstances. It can also develop into hypnotic states that let you modify the problem itself. When we observe our experience we tend to alter it, after all.

Around the same time I was beginning to experience progressively more troubling dreams, which really isn’t my idea of fun. At first each night was filled with frustrating and strange phantasms, but over the course of a few nights they became more oppressive.

As all this unfolded I began to feel very depressed. It was as though I had become vulnerable, my defences sapped, and my will and life with them. Both of us were rather miserable.

Then the climax of these events arrived. I found myself asleep, caught in a dream in which the environment continually transformed. As often happens in my dreams I am assigned some mysterious task which I cannot decipher.

Then I find myself tangled in the branches of a huge dead tree animated by a malevolent intelligence. All around me is a blasted night-time landscape. Really solid nightmarish stuff. The tree has any number of vines which lash about and seek to restrain or choke me.Then a great knife appears and floats towards me. I know that it has a malevolent intention of its own, that an invisible hand guides it. This isn’t good! I think to myself, struggling to escape.

Of course at about that time my unconscious helpfully dumps me out of my sleep. I find myself in bed and in the room is a hovering spectral Aboriginal woman. She is very angry at me and is shrouded in an eerie and decidedly unfriendly-looking host of shadows.

I know that there is a lot of terribly history in Australia so I am not particularly surprised that a local land or ancestor spirit might decide to take out some of that misery on me.

From what I understand it isn’t like all the spirits in Aboriginal mythologies are friendly in the first place, let
alone to marauding European invaders or their contemptuous descendents.

I also know that I know how to deal with this sort of situation. I can be up and summoning Thor very quickly,
bellowing and shrieking his name, and in particular signing the hammer, which usually works wonders.

(UPG alert: this is probably a modern practice, I don’t think it has much historical basis, though it works very
nicely nonetheless).

However in situations like this I don’t really want to leap from my bed roaring the varied violent epithets of the Thunder God. So instead I bargain with the interloping entity.

I explain that “we both know” that I could put on such a performance if I wanted to, and that it would hurt them big time. Then I suggest that we pretend that I’ve already done the whole thing, so that they can bugger off and I can go about my business (e.g. sleep).

This kind of bargaining seems surprisingly effective, and it certainly saves a lot of time and effort.

Ok, so its late, I’m in bed, there is a strange being in the room. As soon as I awake I feel it trying to force my eyes closed, trying to lull me back to sleep again. I can sense the dream with the tree and the knife is waiting for me and I really don’t want to find out what happens
next.

So in addition to bargaining with this spirit I am signing the hammer in a very understated way with one hand. I explain that half of my ancestors were recent migrants (so their hands are clean of the atrocities inflicted by European invaders in Australia); and that while the other half probably were involved in some way at some point, I don’t exactly approve of white Australia’s shameful history.

By my logic, I explain, there isn’t much point attacking me. Not while there are so many folks in the country still actively trying to put the screws on both indigenous Australians and the spirits of their culture and land. I say that I think it would be much more advantageous if the spirit and I instead try to communicate.

Well with that the whole threatening vibe coming off this being goes away. It comes closer to me and I can no longer resit falling asleep at its command. I find myself in a hall or a forest (I’m not sure) and here the being appears as an Aboriginal woman.

She is trying to speak to me, to communicate, but there is a tremendous echo on her voice, as though she is on the far side of a great ravine, and I can’t make out the words.

I tell her this, and she comes closer and closer, still shouting, but although her voice becomes clearer I still can’t make out what she is saying. Then suddenly the dream ends.

Since that night I’ve recovered my emotional equilibrium and Annalise no longer has strange intuitions of being attacked either. No further hint of the spirit has been evident, so I really don’t understand what happened that caused the change.

Perhaps the spirit was satisfied that I was genuine in my outlook and went elsewhere to vent its rage? I really don’t know. Perhaps it just got bored of me, or perhaps I just didn’t have what it took to communicate successfully.

I know that in some circles it is not acceptable for non-Aboriginal Australians to talk about experiences with beings which seem to originate from Aboriginal spirituality.

For example right wing loonies just do not want to know about anything outside of their own narrow minds; whereas some left wing loonies (particularly the academically-minded) can’t see the difference between cultural appropriation and spontaneous (and in this case unasked for) experiences.

But I think Australian heathens should openly, if cautiously, acknowledge these kinds of experiences. We are here in this land, not Europe or anywhere else. Like it not we are going to have to come to grips with that – spiritually, practically and politically.

This land is forced to deal with us by our very presence – at some point the ørlög this generates has to mount into interaction, be it positive or negative. We are going to have to move with a lot of care and a lot of respect if we want to forge a positive relation with this land and its people.

I have a feeling that the forces of this land are a lot bigger than we heathens can probably begin to comprehend. With respect, Australia has an ancient power that I am not sure Europe and her children can match.

The heathens of old varied their religious beliefs and practices relative to the climate and geography in which they lived. This is already occurring here in Australia, but perhaps if we consciously embrace this attitude our spiritual practices will be – perhaps less formally true to ancestral heathen, but far more true psychologically.

There I go again with my talk of psychological reconstruction, which amounts to the conviction that spirituality is more than the forms in which it finds its home.

Mythology, culture, belief and practice are all doors into experience. These doors are not totally arbitrary and may even prove indispensable, but they are not enough by themselves.

If we mistake the door for the experience then we end up with empty dogma and dead religion. This is a big part of why faiths like Catholicism are on the decline in the Western world. Heathens would do well to forge a different path, and here in Australia we may find the very land itself teaching us (whether by stick or carrot I do not know).

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Fire and Water

I preface these comments by saying that I have omitted some important details from what follows and edited what remains to make sense in light of these omissions. The elements omitted are simply too personal and/or too way out for me to want to share to the whole of the internet. What remains will, I hope, prove to be of interest nevertheless.

In the last few years I’ve had four particularly magical dreams. In these four dreams the experience was so vivid that it felt as though my physical body were in the dream. At the end of several of these dreams, figures from the dreams have remained once I’ve woken up and continued to very tangibly communicate with me.

These dreams aren’t a result of my attempts to develop my spiritual power or use ritual to contact spiritual or magical forces. They fall more into the category of spontaneous experiences that Bil Linzie says distinguish his notion of “real” seidh from the more structured practices performed by groups like Hrafnar.

I should emphasise that even though these dreams (and other experiences I’ve had) probably place me more in the Bil Linzie camp in terms of the kind of seidh I’ve known, I disagree with his view that more considered or consciously constructed seidh work is necessarily inferior.

The first three dreams happened in the space of a week back in 2006. I will only give a short synopsis of each.

First Dream:

In the first I found myself part of a choir that was to perform at a strange concert on a boat in Sydney Harbour. One of my fellow singers was a very intriguing woman who seemed completely larger than life. Her radiance and spirit made everything around her seem completely dull. I felt immediately drawn to her.

After the rehearsal it occurred to me that no one had explained the money side of things to this gig (which I had after all just suddenly found myself in the midst of rehearsing for). This was my excuse to talk to the intriguing woman.

I ran after her and asked her about how we would get paid. She did not know, it turned out, but was loathe to part ways with me. In fact she simply stated that she wanted to stay with me forever! I must admit to feeling overwhelmed with desire for this being, whose radiant aura so thoroughly outshone everything and everyone around
her.

But although it was clear by now that she was non-human and that, despite how real it felt, I was probably dreaming, I could not accept her offer – in particular, because I am married and I love my wife! I stood fast and so we parted ways, though it seemed this would not be the last time I would meet this being.

Second Dream:

I am visiting my father. A pall comes over him and, like a lashing dragon (which is certainly something like how he can be in reality), he starts tearing strips off every decision and act I’ve ever made. My career, my interests, my marriage, you name it – even things that are out of my control (such as my musical taste)!

I am overcome with hurt and rage and then chaos breaks loose. The fabric of the dream tears and everything is destroyed, my entire worldly existence and all markers thereof.

It seems there is a theme here, one which I had not previously noticed – namely that both the woman and my dream-father sought to pull me away from my material, earthly life and point me to different horizons. Their means – seduction and violence – differed of course, but perhaps the intention was the same.

Third Dream:

I find myself living out a series of life-spans. In each life span I face some terrible struggle and I am defeated – only to be reborn again, and again, and again, and again. The life spans zip by faster and faster as I become more and more bewildered by their endless torrent.

Finally I find myself in a strange parallel reality in which we have to remake one of the Rambo films on an alien planet and I have to play the lead role – except there is no acting, it is all real. Thus I find myself in an extra-terrestrial jungle, questing for who knows what.

I am ambushed by the tree-dwelling alien locals and after a swift battle they subdue me. They inform me that I am to be initiated into a very high mystery. I am forced to ingest poison and black out.

Then I am in a strange multi-dimensional open space which I cannot describe. To my right and left are scintillating beings of pure power and the two of them hold me up. We are hurtling through this strange space, the flight seemingly powered by the blazing energies that pour off them.

These two being pass me through a series of initiations, as my perspective becomes broader, and richer, and more expansive. They explain that they have come to assist me on my way through existence. I ask them what their names are. Odin? Freya? All of these – and more – they reply, smirking at my earthling provinciality.

I don’t really understand how they can both be and not be my ancestral gods, but somehow I am deeply convinced. They explain they are taking me somewhere important.

Then I wake up in what seems like the house where my band-mates in Ironwood live, an old and dilapidated home of faded glory. Except in this dreaming reality it is far larger, more ramshackle, and more eerily gothic than in real life.

I somehow know that I must seek out something in this house, something which I will know only when I find it. And so I find myself exploring dark tunnels, strange stairwells, a whole mould-covered, shadow-drenched universe of mystery. Dangerous beings abound and I realise that my time is running out.

Finally I come into a large hall, the ceiling lost in darkness. There is someone else here, but they are invisible. A ghost. He tells me a terrible tale through ethereal sobs. Once he had a daughter but then through his arrogance and foolishness she was lost to him. And he has worn himself almost to nothingness seeking her.

I realise that, somehow, this ghost and I are connected or related. It is a kind of ancestor to me, passing on a torch and a challenge.

Suddenly, I am awake – for real awake. My body is on fire with energy. But the ghost is still there! I hear his voice as clearly as I would a physical human being: “the challenge is passed on to you now”. The challenge to seek out whatever it is that his daughter represents.

In the months after these dreams I generally lapsed into a rather non-spiritual phase, mostly due to a number of very difficult challenges that entered my life financially and so forth.

But since I met Donovan my spirituality has been getting fed a lot more regularly, and starting Elhaz Ablaze has forced me to open into the stream of magic even more – after all if I am going to have a regular column then I need to have something to write about, and I would much rather write (and read) about practical experiences than my opinions and beliefs.

I think this renewed attention to this part of myself has created a fertile ground for the deeper aspects of my being to awaken again as they were back in 2006. Reading a lot of James Hillman’s work has also had a critical impact on this re-awakening. I think his work should be mandatory for all heathens to read, even though he isn’t a heathen but rather a psychological polytheist. Start with A Blue Fire
and go from there!

Heading into Yule this year I started having very strange and wild dreams and I knew some strange new upheaval was coming towards me.

A few weeks before Yule I fell very sick and became quite depressed for a little while as a result. It was a very hard thing but I have learned that you come back from the depths if you have patience and a little contempt for the ego’s mind games.

On the day of the Yule celebration I was very sick in the stomach and spent most of the day vomiting.

We couldn’t figure out what was the cause except the vague possibility of food poisoning. Eventually I must have thrown up whatever caused the problem however because just as the Yule festivities were due to begin I suddenly completely recovered.

While I was sick during that day I wandered through all kinds of strange worlds, and in particular the dark lands of Helheim. Freya appeared to me and she told me that I was in a process. I had died one death with my recent sickness, and this illness and attendant world-walking was a second death. She warned that I would have to die one more death yet.

Incidentally, this little but of Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis (UPG) seems to fit with the idea that Freya is identical with Gullveig, the volva who the gods destroy three times by fire – and who is then reborn as Heidh, the Shining. Who would be more likely to come to tell me I was undergoing a somewhat similar process of
triple death?

After Yule I continued to have many wild and strange dreams – until a few weeks ago when I had the fourth of my significant dreams – and the third of the three deaths Freya spoke of.

The last night of dreaming I had series of intensely embodied dreams. In them I had to pass all sorts of tests and challenges, in all kinds of identities. In some cases it was members of my family that set the challenges.

After completing many of these tests I started to be overcome with déjà vu – indeed, it felt as though I had actually done every one of these tests many times over in the past.

The realisation woke up – and on either side of me there was a being composed of intense white light. The two beings started to speak to me. They were quite circuitous in their manner of speaking and very direct.

After a great deal of negotiation they agreed to permit me to refer to them as Fire and Water. They were the woman in the first dream, my father in the second, and the two great beings in the third dream.

Fire and Water are like trans-mythological beings, who predate even my heathen ancestral gods. They represent a distilled expression of divinity – at least insofar as I am able to experience it.

They told me that, though I might not know it, my task in this life is to bring together the riches of my internal spiritual life with the physical realities of finite existence. To me this is a great challenge but they were very certain that watching me would be an interesting exercise!

By passing the challenges of my dreams it seems I have been granted the perspective on life that they were trying to give me those years ago through seduction and destruction. This was the third death – the death of my limited horizons. I think that this in turn frees me to seek whatever the “daughter” in my third dream represents.

There were other things too but I won’t go into that here.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had some spontaneous experiences in the last year that could have come straight out of an alchemy handbook. On a whim I therefore did some research – and discovered that alchemical Mercury is the union of Fire and Water, and of Spirit and Matter. Given that Mercury and Woden are cousins this explains a lot about my connection to the latter.

Since that experience a month or two ago I have been feeling myself changing, becoming more confident, or at least less enslaved to my limitations. The full consequences of these experiences are still unfolding. I don’t know if I should describe them as “real” or “psychological” or something else, but I do know that their consequences are proving to be highly positive.

Of course, Fire and Water do not exactly have a home in heathen mythology, but their existence does make me ponder the nature of the boundaries of any set of myths.

Insofar as any mythology is a cultural expression of mysteries which are (at least somewhat) beyond human comprehension, I find myself reaffirming the importance of heathenism being more than cultural/practical reconstruction.

Fire and Water seem to consider themselves as trans-cultural, able to manifest in a variety of unique and individual ways. I think it is a bit like how for the ancient Greeks the gods often had to be met in very specific manifestations.

Thus they had, for example, the Temple of Zeus at Athens. Now Zeus at Athens is a different entity to Zeus at Sparta from what I understand, even though they are nevertheless both Zeus. This kind of looseness around the distinction between universal and particular seems a common hallmark of polytheism, especially Indo-European polytheism (look at all of Odin’s identities or the many incarnations of the Hindu deities).

Our ancestors lived on the horizon of the unknown; introducing border-dwelling into our own lives is just as important as reconstructing the communal/cultural dimensions of heathenism – otherwise we risk modern heathenry becoming a caricature of the old ways, not their rebirth.

Furthermore, when the unconscious/deep mind/magical beings/gods/whatever speak (choose-your-own-belief-system), they may or may not have a concern for our beliefs about how things are or should be. In order to respect them and allow them to help us grow or transform or distil we need to be open to possibilities that our conscious (ego) reconstructions might not anticipate.

The well known chaos magician Fenwick Rysen has written about Fire and Water as essential forces in his spirituality. I’ve not been able to contact him but I’d love to see what he would make of the experiences I have described.

For me I know that Fire and Water are essential parts of who I am – and their presence changes my heathenry for the better, even though they appear in no historical manual and no Eddic poem. I’ve never incorporated such wholesale UPG into my spirituality before but it seems right.

Such mysterious and elemental beings certainly would not seem out of place in the old poems, although their machinations probably work in a different context to the Aesir, Vanir and Jotnar. And of course, Freyja knows about them and predicted their coming too.

It’s often been pointed out that the heathen lore we still have was once the UPG of our ancestors. It’s important to keep the difference between our and their creations clear so that others are not misled, but that said it would be a sad reconstruction of heathenry that we engage in if we do not do as they did and delve into the realms of magical experience with trust that those experiences are meaningful.

Fire and Water might also be found in the more purely animistic beliefs that polytheism proper grew out of. They certainly have opened a door for me into a wider, darker and richer world.

Neurosis sing:

We stand encircled by wing and fire
Our deepest ties return and turn upon us

Heathenry might be about finding ourselves here and now in the grand weave of history and life, rather than slumbering in disconnected numbness. If this is so then Fire and Water, and the entire process I am experiencing, are about as heathen as you can get.

I’d like to conclude this article with some of the lyrics I wrote for our forthcoming Ironwood album :Fire:Water:Ash: (incidentally the title of the album and the reference to fire and water in the lyrics occurred prior to my encounter with Fire and Water, though with hindsight it all seems connected).

The Serpent Seeks its Tail

Streams of steaming ice
Streams of molten flame
Compelled to clash
In the whirling halls of chaos

Is this a creation myth?
Screeching atomic tide
Stars blaze with insanity
In generation destruction delights

Formed by ice, forged by flame
Frail mortal breathing
Lathed by salt, poison laced
Frail mortal dreaming

Is this a parable?
An endlessly retold tale
A failed symbol for moment:
Thus untamed is time

Nature dismissed as nothing
Ancient Ur-laws lost, defied
Can you remember your own being?
Where does your weary heart hide?

A glimpse of boiling Ginnung
Sloughs off this armoured weight
Purging power of Salt,
Fire, Water and Ash

Dismiss with contempt
The false forms you hold
Become what you are
Become what you must be

Destroyed by ice, destroyed by flame
Frail mortal breathing
Lathed by salt, poison laced
This frail mortal dreaming

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Altered States, Electric Bass

In amongst the rest of the chaos of my life one of my bands, Sword Toward Self, is in the midst of recording our debut full length album (my other main band, Ironwood, has a full length currently being mixed).

We commenced laying down the bass over the weekend. My goal was to finish half of the album over the weekend which I managed comfortably – there was even time to develop some new ideas for the bass arrangements and record some of the bass solos. I think we also managed to get just about the perfect bass tone, which is an ongoing challenge given the huge tonal range of the six string basses I play.

Recording is a very intense process, but I found this particular session to be the most full on recording experience I’ve had. And yet it went quicker and more smoothly than, say, when I recorded my vocal parts for Ironwood (of which there were a lot and often very challenging to get just right).

So if this weekend past’s recording session went so smoothly, why do I say it was so intense?

The music, the hours of intense focus on performing everything perfectly, sent me into an extremely altered state of consciousness. There is something particularly indulgent about recording. It makes one’s creative expression as a musician the absolute centre of the universe for a condensed period of time.

Even during breaks, having meals, etc, one’s mind becomes utterly captivated by the music. Music exists even when it is not being played, even when it is only being imagined. So during those moments of the process when I am not actually recording the songs play on, shutting down more and more of my higher functions, concentrating all of my faculties on the task at hand.

You might say that I take the task very seriously – and I really do. Particularly for a band like Sword Toward Self, where the music is so complex and often very fast. But this last weekend it felt like my deep mind was rising up through the strata of my being and consuming my entire being as it sought to grapple with the
creative process.

Perhaps part of the reason for this intensity is that I feel somehow spiritually connected to electric bass. That is an odd thing to say, but I really know of no other instrument that will ever feel as right in my hands.

I do play guitar as well, and I’m pretty good with finger-style acoustic guitar in particular. But I’ll always be able to do much more technical things and express more emotion on bass than on guitar (even things that conventional wisdom says should be easier on guitar because it’s a lighter, smaller instrument!)

Something I occasionally have pondered in my life, however, is the curious particularity of my connection to an instrument which, after all, was only invented some 60 years ago. I do have a great-uncle who played double bass (though I never met him), but there is a massive gulf between that and modern six string
electric bass guitars!

I often wonder: how many people never get the chance to find the medium that is perfectly suited to them? If I had been born in a third world country I would probably have never encountered electric bass. I might have played something else, but I would never have developed the level of skill or depth of musical connection that I find in playing bass.

Or if I had been born one hundred years ago? Again I would have missed out. This sort of invisible tragedy of possibility lost must be occurring all the time in all the arts, crafts and practices our species has invented and lost – or has yet to invent – or which are only available to some of humanity at a given time.

Or does the collective unconscious tailor the movements and motifs of its endless performance to the available resources and technology of the time? Am I so attuned to bass because, somehow in the infinitely complexity of wyrd, bass and I were made to be for one another? Perhaps some other instrument or art would have been the heart for my blood to beat in if things were different.

This still doesn’t guarantee that I was destined with any certainty to find my way into the world of bass. Yet it was a burning desire for it that drove me to take up the instrument, a fanatical love of bass which one rarely encounters in the guitar-obsessed silliness of most modern western music.

Coming out of the recording session I have found myself struggling to readjust to reality. I’ve been so deeply and completely dissolved in that world that this one suddenly seems totally ill-fitting. The last few days I have been struggling to recover my sense of drive and purpose. Perhaps there is a high cost to squandering so much of oneself on something so gratuitous and extravagant as artistic expression.

I am still not fully ‘back’ in this world, and I know that I will be finishing the remainder of the album this coming weekend. So now I feel like I am suspended in a valley between two dark and mysterious mountains.

These thoughts about the manifestation of zeitgeists in individual lives lead me to reflect on the philosophy of attempting to reconstruct specific magical practices from archaic times. If the seidh and rune workers of old were using what was available to them then perhaps it could be more important to feel into their mindset, regardless of the trappings and forms of one’s magical practice.

This psychological reconstructionism could never amount to more than arbitrary opinion, yet for each individual undertaking this challenge I suspect that rich veins of spiritual wealth might await.

So in this spirit I am going to attempt to use the massive and prolonged altered state that I am likely to enter again when recording this weekend. I will simply specify the particular performance of each song as a symbol of a magical intention. Every take, every time I retune, every time I finish getting a passage of
music perfect – this will be another trigger of the intention symbolised by the performance and the process.

And also, this time I am going to indulge in some measures to help myself adjust to consensus reality after the recording process is complete. Perhaps consume some raw sea salt for a start, and definitely get outside. It’s very painful to be caught between worlds and I need to prepare myself now for the realmshift that the recording process has so far involved.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

On Being Still

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” – Albert Camus.

At the end of my recent article “On Being Stuck” I suggested that I would experiment with the application of the runes of Need and Ice (or Nauthiz and Isa in the Proto-Germanic) to deal with the feeling of stuckness, coldness and despair.

I’ve had recourse to these runes on three occasions since then. Each time they have indeed helped me to move from stuckness to stillness and from stillness to fluid action.

Each time I either thought about or chanted the runes. The first time I used them to help myself feel better the change was immediate. Just thinking about their significance, their power to pass through the constriction, the cold, the hard armour of the winter river – it made it impossible for me to stay in my corner of shadow.

A similar trick occurred next time, with the difference that this time I chanted the runes and pretty soon had a good spontaneous sway going too, a bit of seething-style seidh. I felt like a veil of cold poured backwards away from me and dissolved. I felt free, flexible, warm, my heart beating strongly again.

The third occasion was some chanting I did with Donovan. As always we explored some wild territory, rasping, singing, roaring, screeching, droning. Every time we do magic together we manage to get a little more relaxed, focussed, and intense. I think this bit of magic unblocked some things for both of us, psychologically speaking.

The speculative idea I had – that embracing Need and Ice, the vanguard of stuckness/stillness/coldness, can produce transformation where even transformative fire dares not tread – has born immediate fruit. One of the outstanding elements of this approach is that it runs with the direction that the pattern of wyrd is already headed. Instead of resisting the shadows and cold we turn with their tide. At their heart we find their negation and come forth out the other end.

There is not even the fear of going back that more obvious or pro-active responses to such spiritual coldness can create, forged partly from anxiety as such fiery responses are. I have found a way of walking frozen, subterranean roads with total yielding, yet without being destroyed in that yielding.

From these recent and promising experiences I must say that Need and Ice represent a kind of transformative passivity. They require us to respond to the circumstance – “in this weather we must build fire” (Neurosis) – but the response is founded on a acceptance of what cannot be changed, only turned with. Even a negative wyrd can be ridden to a positive outcome, like tacking against the wind to take your ship home to its port.

Ice offers the illusion of immutability, but now I see the illusion as illusion as well as an invitation to despair. The two forces cancel one another out when we embrace them, leaving us, slightly dumbfounded, in the clutch of spring.

I started this article with a quote from an existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. Apart from the immediate relevance of the quote I chose it deliberately because I see heathenism as being an existentialist spirituality.

For all the belief in gods, giants, elves, other worlds, magic, mystery and the unknowable order of wyrd the heathens of old were necessarily very practical, this-worldly people. I suppose living in old Europe with limited technology, close to the earth and the seasonal cycles, you just had to be to survive. They seemed to regard one’s actions in this world as more important than any particular afterlife or cosmic plan.

They might have been animists – recognising the living spirit of all things – rather than materialists/nihilists as the existentialist philosophers tend to be. But the same attitude – that this life is what matters – is shared by heathen and existentialist.

So the idea that we can overcome shadow, ice and despair by following the path of Need and Ice into their heart – rather than resisting, fleeing or bowing down to some transcendental ideal – well, I guess this recent foray of mine into Need and Ice magic is a kind of existential rune magic.

I should add that although here I am celebrating a this-worldly, existentialist attitude to heathenism, I am by no means dismissing the other-worldly aspects of Germanic mythology/folk lore, nor the otherworldly and transformative magical elements of heathenism.

Indeed my own native tendency is towards otherworldliness – even as a child I identified with the changeling folk stories of the Brother Grimm, in which an elven or otherwise otherworldly child is mistakenly left with human parents to great anguish and difficulty. It has been a long struggle to even become as this-worldly as I now am, and I am a long way from where I would like to be.

So I am certainly not arguing for the more boring, anti-spiritual model of heathenism in celebrating a kind of existential approach to heathen spirituality. Rather I am finding with relief that as I embrace this life I slowly discover the ways that I can exert power in this reality, to make at least some part of it turn to alignment with my own nature and being. The magic of Need and Ice represents a powerful step for me along this path.

Of course, most people must struggle with the question of their own power to effect meaning and change in the world. Indeed, Alfred Adler’s model for the cause of psychological problems was the “inferiority complex”, which occurs because when we are children we really are mostly powerless in this world of adults. To lead happy and successful adult lives we need to unlearn this powerful lesson of growing up so that we can act with strength and confidence.

Perhaps Need and Ice could offer an initiatory doorway for those of us struggling with this-worldiness (whether due to our age, character or fears). Face death without struggle and who knows what might come of it?

“Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive” (Jung).

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail